A sectorized beamspace adaptive diversity combiner for multipath environments

The beam diversity technique is effective in combating multipath fading in wireless communications. In a beam diversity system, multiple receiving branches are formed with multiple antenna beams with distinctive patterns. These beams are synthesized in such a fashion that the fading phenomena observed at different branches are nearly uncorrelated. The disadvantage of such a system is the lack of adaptivity for cochannel interference (CCI) suppression. In this paper, an adaptive beam diversity combiner is proposed for sectorized signal reception. The diversity branches are formed with several adaptive beamformers whose response patterns encompass an angular sector in the field-of-view of the receiver. With a set of judiciously chosen weight vectors, effective diversity combining can be achieved inside the sector, and out-of-sector CCI can be suppressed via nulling. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed scheme.